A new wrinkle cropped up at the end of volume 2 of this gender-swapped, loosely-inspired twist on The Little Mermaid. Namely, Naru’s (mermaid) fiancee has also been looking for him and has also made a contract with the sea witch Mellow to continue her search on land. But if Moana, the fiancee, doesn’t get Naru to fall for her within a year then Moana will turn into sea foam. But if Naru doesn’t get the human girl Nami to fall for him within a year then he’ll turn into sea foam as well!
With so much implied potential for tragedy it’s time for Naru, Moana, and fellow (transformed) merman classmate Ryou to meet another merperson and realize that there is hope for them getting out of this predicament after all.
As readers have likely suspected from the start, the sorcerer Mellow hasn’t been playing fair with granting wishes considering that this set-up seems designed to make at least one person die (and either way Naru isn’t coming back to reclaim his crown prince status which is all Mellow needs to continue taking Naru’s place). Truthfully there probably is some kind of love triangle that these three characters could pull off to save everyone’s lives but the romance in Mermaid Boys seems to be a bit too “traditional” and constrained for an OT3 to be even a possibility, and it would be out of character for a shojo manga anyway. Although I will note that age-gap romances sadly are not however, which is what Nami and Naru’s relationship would be if it (almost certainly) comes to pass (at least Naru comes off as being mentally 14). Thus we are introduced to yet another straight pairing later in this volume of the pining mermaid x human who lives near the ocean variety, and honestly it feels a little excessive to have had so many of them in just three volumes, which makes for a rather boring subplot. I would much rather Mermaid Boys tighten up it’s pacing and either make significant progress in the romance and/or introduce way more magical and fantasy elements to keep the story moving.
Even with half a dozen bright, interesting paths to follow before it, Mermaid Boys continues to choose the well-trodden, dull path of a banal shoujo romance. The volumes aren’t a slog to read through in the moment but they feel less and less interesting the more I look back on them. The Yen Press releases are also current with the Japanese releases — this volume was originally published in 2017 in Japan but I’m not sure if the series is officially on hiatus or not, so it will be a while before anything else happens in this story, both figuratively and literally. I’m not sure I’ll be sticking around for it however — there are plenty of other shojo fish in the sea to read and many of them look far more appetizing right now.